News internet meme as a form of compressed media text

Thе article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the phenomenon of news internet memes as an innovative form of media communication in the context of the digital transformation of the modern information space. The subject of the study is the linguistic, semiotic, and pragmatic aspects of language compression in Internet news memes, which are considered a hybrid form of media text that combines the informational function of traditional journalism with the playful mechanisms of Internet culture. The aim of the work is to describe the specifics of linguistic compression in news internet memes as a form of compressed media text and to identify the patterns of their functioning in the digital media space. Language compression in news memes enables the creation of semantically rich texts of minimal length that meet the requirements of modern digital communication, while decoding the compressed meaning requires background knowledge and cultural competence from recipients. The study uses methods of structural-semantic analysis, content analysis, and pragmatic analysis. The material consists of 100 news internet memes posted on the English-language social network Reddit and devoted to current socio-political events. The study identified the main types of news memes (graphic, video, and text memes) and determined the key means of linguistic compression operating at the morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels: abbreviations and acronyms of the Internet environment, compressed lexical units, intentional spelling errors, elliptical constructions, linguistic play with phraseological units, allusions to precedent phenomena. Language compression leads to a partial implication of the meaning of memes, the understanding of which requires background knowledge and reference to precedent phenomena in the linguistic and cultural community. The results of the study can be applied in the fields of media linguistics, mass communication theory, the study of Internet discourse, and digital journalism. The study shows that linguistic compression in news memes allows for the creation of semantically rich texts of minimal length that meet the requirements of modern digital communication, while decoding the compressed meaning requires background knowledge and cultural competence from the recipients.